Sunday, March 16, 2014

Zombies, and more

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in November
2004)

Observations on a more commercial batch of
movies this week.

Dawn of the Dead

I’m a great admirer of George Romero’s 1979
zombie classic, and there is no significant respect in which Zach Snyder’s
remake improves on it - unless you give extra points for casting Canadian
actors. The decision to change the original’s shambling, braindead zombies into
lightning-fast killing machines sums up how the new version tarts everything
up, losing Romero’s peerless satire in the process. The first film’s suburban
mall, where a group of survivors hide from the zombie plague, was depicted with
such peerless detail that I remember the geography more vividly than almost any
other movie location; here it’s just a backdrop. The superficial conflicts and
shallow characterization in Snyder’s version makes you realize how unfairly
Romero’s terse actors were criticized at the time. And so on.

But if you forget Romero (and for that
matter, Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later,
another superior film along similar lines), Snyder’s film is actually a better
than average action-horror picture. It’s effectively eerie and repulsive (I
stared and squirmed), and although set in Minnesota, it sure feels Canadian (it
was shot near Toronto, with Sarah Polley and numerous other vaguely familiar
faces), which in these circumstances seems endearing. And you know, sometimes
you just feel like agreeing with Polley’s remark to the Globe and Mail: every movie should have a zombie in it. Especially
in George W. Bush’s America.

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

Ace screenwriter Charlie Kaufman (Adaptation, Being John Malkovich) is
already a semi-legendary figure, but I have trouble warming up to him. He’s a
master of structure, and not in a hollow way either; every film takes you
somewhere you’ve never been before in terms of both plot and theme. But I’ve so
far found them a little cold and ultimately not that relevant to anything I’m
interested in (which of course could be primarily a measure of limited horizons
on my own part). The latest Kaufman film, directed by Michel Gondry, is the
best so far, in that Kaufman’s complex extrapolations seem here to flow from a
half-profound (and if not profound, at least beguiling) notion of the human
condition.

Jim Carrey plays a low-key, buttoned-down
man, who takes an impulsive train trip to nowhere and meets a kinetic woman
played by Kate Winslet. They fall into a tentative relationship, but then we
shift in time – the relationship is over, and she’s had him erased from her
mind using the technology of Laguna Inc., a slightly seedy-looking operation.
He decides to go through the same thing, and a team of technicians (Mark
Ruffalo, Elijah Wood, Kirsten Dunst) carries out the procedure that night in
his apartment, while he’s lying unconscious. Except that as the procedure’s in
full flight, he decides he wants to retain her memory after all. His buried
attempts to fight the machine’s onslaught, mixed in with his vague
consciousness of what’s going on around him, and the technicians’ additional
entanglements, form a reality/time-bending, impressionistic, surreal web that’s
challenging, even by Kaufman’s standards, to the audience’s faculties.

The movie is drawn towards bleak landscapes
of ice and snow or desolate beaches: as viewed through Gondry’s loose, grainy
style this mutes the story’s potential conceptual overkill. Eternal Sunshine thus forms a poignant,
edge-of-heartbreak meditation on human connection.But the visual grunginess, the patent
imperfections of the relationship, and Carrey and Winslet’s refusal to play
their roles as conventional romantic figures, keep it from becoming a high-tech
soap opera. Rather, the film extrapolates the normal detritus of normal life
into a vast psychic struggle, placing the mundane balancing that’s the stuff of
relationships under a microscope that somehow illuminates even as it twists and
evades. In a sense it’s one of the most optimistic movies of recent times in
that it posits how even the most chilling technology may possess some profound
redemptive power.

David Edelstein of Slate thinks this may be the best movie of the last ten years.
Others regard it as a movie to be admired more than loved. I have some sympathy
with the latter view, and yet in a way that’s a measure of its achievement. The
film tangles with the human condition without becoming ingratiating – indeed,
it’s unclear whether we’re meant to find Carrey and Winslet particularly
likeable, or whether we’re meant to identify with them in the way we do normal
protagonists. By so bravely severing the conventional mechanics of
identification, the film illustrates the inherent arbitrariness of all
relationships, without diminishing their crucial status. Along with any number
of passing concepts and felicities of execution that make you gasp, it adds up
to quite a show.

Taking Lives

D J Caruso’s thriller, with Angelina Jolie
as an FBI agent going after a serial killer in Montreal, seems to have received
surprisingly good reviews, citing Caruso’s sharp visual style, the appeal of
the Montreal locations, and a good performance by Jolie as her customary
offbeat self. These attributes are all there to be seen, but I can’t say the
film did a lot for me. It’s yet another over-elaborate premise, with little
stand-alone significance, and a “surprise” ending that distinctly isn’t. I
enjoyed it well enough, but there’s never a moment when you wouldn’t be better
off watching something else. And Jolie’s charismatic self-assurance has its
downside – the thematic weight, to the extent there is any, comes from her
unwise infatuation with a key witness, but I could never believe she was doing
more than toying with him.

Still, the location (albeit filled mainly
with estimable French actors like Tcheky Karyo and Olivier Martinez playing
Quebecois cops, or else with Americans like Gena Rowlands and Ethan Hawke)
earns a rare distinction – two big Hollywood movies in the same week that might
qualify at least as half Canadian. But if this were a real Canadian film, how
would The Barbarian Invasions’ Cannes
award-winner Marie-Josee Croze be languishing in a nothing two-scene role as a
pathologist? Only, maybe, if the film were cast by zombies.

Enter...Zombie King

Since I was talking
about zombies, I’ll say a few words for a movie called Enter...Zombie King, which I saw on DVD (it played a couple of
nights at the Bloor Cinema last year). I know nothing about anyone involved
with it except that it features local cult band The Tijuana Bibles. The film
reflects a somewhat complex aesthetic revolving around wrestling, topless
babes, an odd approach to choosing locations, and of course zombies. The
execution often falters (well, to be honest, it seldom gathers sufficient
momentum to be accused of faltering), and yet I must confess I thought the
movie had its finger on something vaguely admirable. George Romero is credited
for “guidance and inspiration,” and the end credits also promote a wrestling
website. Somewhere at that intersection, eternal sunshine may lurk.

About Me

From 1997 to 2014 I wrote a weekly movie column for Toronto's Outreach Connection newspaper. The paper has now been discontinued and I've stopped writing new articles, but I continue to post my old ones here over time. I also aim to post a daily movie review on Twitter (torontomovieguy) and I occasionally tweet on other matters (philosopherjack).